The Henchman spun slowly away below as the lady-next-door rose up to carry Kevin through the constellations she knew so well from a childhood of gazing through the lens of her kaleidoscopic telescope. Fragments of potential stirred in her mind forming and unforming patterns as northward the whole previous state of the universe, less Henchman, moved turning the Merelion’s vaporous spout into a shower of ice to land SMACK into the welcoming goblet of Sarah’s virgin Piña Colada as she pitchforked a rowdy shanty ’round the Titanic’s lurching deck plates whistling the half-remembered tune to “The Whistling Macaques of the Oronoco Still Call Me Thus” (a childhood skipping song of mixed repute).

So here we have a mess. Characters have gone missing into the wings and we have these curious map jumpers that won’t stay put. Worse, we have a crisis of structure where the tour bus seems to be overturned and obscured by a fuzzy shrubbery of peril that won’t resolve.

It could be that damn map? The dead dog? Machine-Gun Sandy and the bullet pocked ceiling?

We started with arrows and implied directions. And we’ve been here and there to prove it. But does anyone remember if Kevin ever fixed the Ukulele? Shure, he’s been bashed around and romantically involved way too much yet we can’t just wander around here in this story forever. The boat is sinking and he’s dreaming about something that’s hard to know from a place without sense.

This is a blog set up for the Creativity for Learning in HE course and will, confusingly, also serve as home base for myself during Digital Writing Month.

Why do this?

I have a need to keep processing my health situation in the absurdly “private” space of my blog because it won’t let me go. Nor do I feel whole by just being out there while this door remains open behind me. Ever since my second heart failure death has followed me around. Death is a good enough name as a place holder in the gap between my life and the end it came to just before my new valve implant May 3, 2012 (it comes with a card, serial number and date).

The incompleteness I feel needs to be talked about. And yes, I’m fine, it just makes sense to start at the end and work backwards.

… is a global life orientation – a way of viewing life as coherent, structured, manageable and meaningful.

… is a confidence to be able to identify internal and external resources, use and reuse them in a health promoting manner.

… is a way of thinking, being and taking action as a human being.

I need to take a couple of days off but found this on Coherence and Wellbeing that feeds back into our emotions and ability to navigate in the world. My health has been up and down for the last 8 years and the care I’ve received has been at best indifferent. This carelessness of people with each other is something that reminds me of why I felt it necessary to actively resist school. No way was I going to be defeated by the abstract and spirit withering needs of “The System” and I found this a way of forcing creativity as a rebellion against a world that was being explained to me in a rather rough manner.

So, for inspiration on building a diagram (or whatever) of emotions think in terms of how the personal and the impersonal affect your life. Are you allowed to define yourself for yourself or are you modeling the expectations of others?

“Antonovsky defines Coherence as:

…a global orientation that expresses the extent to which one has a pervasive, enduring though dynamic feeling of confidence that one’s internal and external environments are predictable and that there is a high probability that things will work out as well as can reasonably expected (p. 10).”

My past is pretty long at this point. Early on I struggled with school yet once free to determine my own educational path I’ve challenged myself continuously with professional development, extension service art and writing courses, and online almost everything.

Presently I’m without a job and unsure where this is going.

For the future I’m particularly interested in the paradox of being able to “keep track” of people with our big data engines coupling with an apparent need for institutions to simplify people down the conveniently processed objects. In particular, my poor health keeps me occupied and in thoughtful proximity of medical system yet my rural location finds me continually falling through the cracks.

Mostly I’m interested in why the “system” regards me as (not sure how to put this?) just not there. Does a person need to have a story to qualify for care? Can a person survive care without having an internal something that continues to sustain them or do we just go along at a particular body temperature until the fire goes out?

To me, creativity is a continual battle against indifference. It’s about paying attention.

Things I would never bring to the classroom. Came up with one in my previous blog and need 2 others but ran out of ideas.

Until now:

Yesterday was Canadian Thanksgiving and our younger daughter (32) brought her new boyfriend along and he seems frighteningly normal (compared with the other ones) and I think it would be interesting to introduce someone with his relaxed confidence into the family. As relates to creativity in the classroom I think this young man exemplifies a kind of tolerance and thoughtfulness that embodies creativity. He would make a great contrast to my style of irritating people for sport to see what might emerge. So I guess this isn’t an example of what not to bring because creativity is supposed exemplify discomfort, craziness, constant imbalance, confusion and angst? Damn.

Number 3 is not bringing assumptions and tacit knowledge to a classroom unless the students were pros at critical thinking. Which I think is more difficult than creativity. But creativity cannot exist strictly on politeness or non-structured anything’isms. Creativity needs to ground on something that makes it an example that our minds can process, build stories around and extend beyond just pretty. For instance, I found this article from a course at Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley and it makes too many conditions for creativity to exist and I believe the fault is in assuming creativity needs to be anti-social or ferociously impractical as the only means of challenging things. Or worse, presumes the largest portion of people are dullards.

“I was heavily influenced by the entrepreneurship classes that Jerry Engel taught at Haas – when you see a need, you build something,”

And Jennifer Liebermann’s brings up a thought on creativity as reaching past the image of the Great individual Artist to developing groups of creatives who can work together. We need to get unstuck on the genius of the one and do more work on collaborative creativity–what are the joys of working together?

Select something I would never use in my classroom – conflicts with all of us being whole people with sometimes difficult things to explain. From a current perspective the most relevant part of my life is my whole life which I’m defending from erasure by health care providers who apparently see me as an inconvenience.

Of course there are things in my life that should be kept private? Sure there are.

To explain myself – I worked for years with apprentices in the building trades. We were never trained in any way how to train others and since my preference (or luck) brought me the “difficult” ones that reminded me of myself there was really nothing in them seeming in need of correction. Other than their tattered self-esteem. I offered support with very few conditions. My new project involves helping a few people I used to work with who find themselves reassigned to a job they could be better at.